Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon

by Des Barres, Pamela

  Rick James—slam-bam punk-funk sensation. (MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/VENICE, CALIF.)

  There were two separate cases against Rick James and his girlfriend, Tania Anne Hijazi. In the first, in July 1991, twenty-six-year-old Frances Alley alleged that James burned her leg and knee area with a crack pipe, applied alcohol, slapped her across the face with a gun, and burned her groin and torso area with a hot knife. In her testimony about the night in question, Alley—a friend of a friend of James who had left a rehab program in Georgia and was working in a massage parlor in Beverly Hills—alleged that James was “going to teach her a lesson” because he “couldn’t find his eight ball.” “He made me take my clothes off and sit in the chair,” Alley testified. “He ordered Tania to go to the kitchen and heat up the knife until it was red hot.” James then sup–posedly tied her to the chair with neckties. “Rick poured alcohol all over my knees. He started smoking crack. Every time he took a hit, he held part of the crack pipe to my knees.”

  According to her testimony, James slapped her across the face with a handgun, saying, “No one fucks with Rick James in his house.” She then testified that he burned her with a Bic lighter and kept reheating the knife with the lighter or a candle, burning her inner groin area, and from “the abdomen to the pubic line.” “He burned Hijazi twice on the back for smoking outside. I then went into the bathroom and put cold towels on my burns. We then went into Rick’s room and smoked crack.” Besides the torture and mayhem accusations, Frances Alley testified that James had forced her to perform oral sex on his girlfriend. “He told me to lay back and Tania was going to take care of me,” she said. “Then Tania went down on me. He made me do the same to her. I was laying on my back, she got on top of me and kind of straddled me and starts peeing on me, on my burns and stuff. It hurt real bad.

  Q. Were you still afraid?

  A. Of course I was afraid. I was grossed out. It was nasty.

  Q. Then what happened?

  A. Then he told me to put my fingers in her.

  Q. Did you do that?

  A. No. Every chance she and I got, we faked it. We faked giving each other head.

  Rick’s publicist has already told me that he won’t discuss the case and claims Rick is innocent of the charges. I had wanted to ask him about remorse and repentance. Oh well.

  I show a weary security guard all of my identification and then wait on a sticky brown Naugahyde couch for Lt. Annette Hissami, the warden, to walk me down to her office, where we will meet Inmate N63609. It’s way past one o’clock now and the sweat is running down my sides.

  When she finally appears, I’m surprised to see that Hissami is a young, attractive lady in a pretty cool-looking suit. She leads me to her office through the penitentiary grounds, explaining why CRC, with its red-tiled roof and pink walls, looks more like a luxury hotel than a jailhouse. Back in the thirties it had been the Lake Norconian Club, visited by Hollywood celebrities and political bigwigs. “The inmates do the gardening,” she says proudly as we pass through perfectly manicured rosebushes. “This is a medium-security prison,” she emphasizes, and we settle into her office and wait for the inmate to be brought down from his cell. Lieutenant Hissami graciously offers Adam (my photographer) and me a Pepsi. We accept. It’s now two o’clock. She tells me I was lucky to get this interview, that James is going back to court next week.

  During the “ménage à trois–type thing,” Frances Alley alleges, James told her, “I needed to learn how they live in California. He said it was nothing. Everybody in California does that, and I was sexually ignorant and inexperienced.”

  According to Alley’s testimony, when James realized the extent of her burns, he sent her to a pharmacy. “The lady looked at my leg and said, ‘Honey, honey, we can’t do anything for that.’ Then I went to the L.A. Free Clinic. They said, ‘We can’t do anything. This is way too severe. You need a burn unit.’ Then we went to Cedars [Cedars-Sinai, a hospital in Beverly Hills].” After doctors examined Alley, the police were called. But she didn’t want to press charges at that time. Apparently James wanted to apologize to Alley and she went back to his house. “It must have been the crack,” he said and allegedly gave her a check for $320 made to cash. “Here, take this,” he told her. “Go buy yourself something nice. I will take care of you. I will buy you a ring as big as your head.” She stayed a few more days, getting high, and James didn’t bother her anymore. “When everyone was asleep, I left without making a noise,” she testified. “I came back the same night. Rick started calling me a slut, a whore, and a cheap nasty bitch for telling everybody that he did this to me, and I better backtrack, go back and tell all these people that I had supposedly told, that a pimp did it to me. Not Rick James. A pimp. He said he would rip out my tongue. He then said he’d pay five thousand dollars to have me killed. He also said he’d have acid thrown on my face on the street if I didn’t clear his name. It was his girlfriend that opened her mouth, not me. All right. It was his girlfriend. It pissed me off so bad. The next day I went and pressed charges.”

  There’s a power outage in Lieutenant Hissami’s office while we wait for inmate N63609. No air conditioning for a while. She gets on the phone and twenty minutes later it’s blessedly cool again. She keeps looking at her watch, wondering when the prisoner will be brought down for his interview. After making a few calls she finds that the prisoner has been taken to the wrong place. Oh boy. The prisoner is going to be in a great mood for this interview. It’s pushing three o’clock.

  The second incident supposedly took place in November 1992 at the swankpot St. James Club and Hotel on the Sunset Strip. Mary Sauger, an old friend from the music business, testified at James’s trial that she met him and Tania Hijazi to discuss James’s new record label, and after they all got high on cocaine, Rick and Tania began to argue. Sauger tried to leave and was supposedly slapped by Hijazi and James repeatedly until she lost consciousness. They allegedly brought her back by throwing water on her, but continued to strike her. Then James choked her. She was able to leave after being held for twenty hours. She testified that she received a phone message offering money to “shut up,” but she, too, went to Cedars-Sinai and the police were called. James was arrested two weeks later.

  Rick James and Tania Hijazi in court. His prayers didn’t work—Rick was convicted of assault, imprisonment, and furnishing cocaine. (TOM RODRIGUEZ/GLOBE PHOTOS)

  Of all the charges brought against him—assault with a deadly weapon, aggravated mayhem, torture, false imprisonment by force, forced oral copulation, assault with a deadly weapon, sale or transportation of a controlled substance, terrorist threats—he was convicted of only three: assault and false imprisonment of Mary Sauger and furnishing cocaine to Frances Alley. The jury deadlocked eleven to one on the other charges, and in September 1993 he was sentenced to five years in prison. Prosecutors declined to retry James on the other charges, and he pleaded no contest to a simple assault charge against Alley. Tania Hijazi pleaded guilty to assault charges against Sauger and was sentenced to four years. (Her sentence was later reduced due to improper contact between an investigator in the district attorney’s office and Frances Alley [a.k.a. Michelle Allen] while Alley was in jail before Hijazi’s trial.)

  The phone rings in Lieutenant Hissami’s office. “He’ll be right down.” She smiles. She seems relieved. Adam turns on his lights and fiddles with his cameras, looking slightly embarrassed in his orange pantaloons. I take several deep breaths. As Rick James finally strides through the door, I can see that he’s not amused and grin way too brightly at him. We shake hands. He’s put on some weight, and of course the long, braided dreads have gone the way of the studded knee-high boots and foot-long spliffs.

  He’s wearing jailhouse blues but looks healthy and, as I expected, is heartily pissed off. He sits down across from me, and I decide to use the irritation and ask about the court date next week. “I’ve been excluded from this program,” he says matter-of-factly, his eyes spitting fire. Why? I query. “Because of who
I am. That’s the real reason. They say, quote, if you’re convicted of any violence, you’re not allowed here. I have one charge of assault, and of giving cocaine. On my arrest sheet, of course, there were a lot of allegations and alleged reports of torture and mayhem, kidnapping, and all that kind of shit. They say you’re not allowed here with excessive violence. Me and my attorneys, we’re going to debate that. Number one: I was never convicted of this excessive violence, and on the second hand, I’m going to show that there is biasness [sic] within the realms of this institution.” My eyebrows raise in indignation, and he continues. “There are people here with murder, mayhem, arsons. I know a guy that has been retained with an arson and a double murder. And he was convicted of these charges. The judge and the D.A. are aware of what went on in my trial … all the lies and false allegations that went on in my case. There are some set laws here that an institution has to follow. If they’re going to retain some people and exclude others on the basis of their name, race, or …” Celebrityhood, I offer. “Right,” he agrees, warming to me a bit. “Follow the law or don’t follow the law. I’ve done everything that’s required of me to be here. I’m a drug addict. My case revolved around drugs. I had maybe three or four months left to do here, so you can imagine how devastating it was to find out I was going to be excluded from the program. Justice is justice. Just because you’re a drug addict, it doesn’t make you not human. Just because you’re incarcerated, it doesn’t make you a true prisoner. You know what I’m sayin’? Yes, incarcerate but rehabilitate. We subpoenaed the warden and a lot of the records. I’m not gonna take this lying down, I’ve never laid down, I’m not gonna lay down, and I never will lay down.”

  Rick James learned a lot of life’s hard lessons as James Johnson. His mother worked the numbers racket, and his dad, James Johnson, Sr., deserted his family of seven, leaving them in the all-white projects of Buffalo, New York. Rick lied about his age and joined the U.S. Naval Reserves, thinking it would keep him out of Vietnam. But when he got placed in active duty in 1966 and was assigned to a ship headed for the war zone, he fled to Toronto, where, as Ricky Matthews, he joined up with Neil Young and found peace and love with his first band, the Mynah Birds.

  Eventually the band went on to Detroit and amazingly landed a deal with Motown, but Ricky’s soul swoon was short-lived. Motown didn’t want an AWOL act on the label. In 1971 James did eight months in a navy brig in Brooklyn and then bummed around Europe for a while, fronting a blues band, the Main Line, in London. After becoming Rick James, he jammed with California dreamers like Jim Morrison—eating up acts like Sly Stone whole—then put his own soulful jazz, R&B shock-rock band together and went back to Motown. In 1978 he cowrote “You and I,” his first big-time single, and the rest of Come Get It. He was an overnight slam-bam, punk-funk sensation—an outspoken sensation. In 1981 James told the L.A. Times that what he really wanted to do was play rock and roll, but as a black man he couldn’t. By then he had three smash albums under his studded belt but was unable to make the move, afraid of losing his black audience and unwilling to take the time to win over a white following. When hosting a Grammy show, James spoke out against MTV’s reluctance to show videos by black artists, but by the time MTV began to wise up, Rick’s career was stalling. He fell out with Motown in 1985 and his first album for Reprise barely made the charts. By the time M.C. Hammer sampled the “Super Freak” riff in “U Can’t Touch This,” Rick James and his pipe were trapped in his gloomy room.

  I tell Rick that he will soon be back in the news, and he’s very enthusiastic. “Yeah. It’s gonna be top, top news. If I can get past O. J. Simpson,” he adds with sarcasm. “There have been a lot of people here with criminal records worse than Rick James. Especially because I was not convicted of a lot of these things.”

  They deadlocked, right? I inquire. “Yeah, somebody could testify ‘he made love to a pig, he brutally beat this pig, he brutally beat the woman who owned the pig, and he had sex with a horse’—in other words, a person could say outrageous things, then when you get to court, the judge finds you not guilty of all these things, but when you get to prison, they say, ‘We can’t keep you here because it says you made love with the pig and beat the pig and beat the pig’s owner.’ If you’re going to build your laws around allegations and fabrications, then what the hell’s really goin’ on?”

  All this talk about barnyard animals and sex is sort of freaking me out, considering what he’s in here for. I look for a way to change the subject, but he’s not finished. “It looks like I came here and was a fuck-up. I find myself trying to defend myself. I’ve done everything a man can possibly do. I haven’t gotten any write-ups, I haven’t been in trouble, I graduated top of the CCP drug class [Civil Commitment Education Program].” I admit that it doesn’t make much sense. “No, it doesn’t make sense, and we’re going to fight it.”

  There’s something about this guy that I like. He’s full of heated charisma and bad-assed attitude that nine months in prison hasn’t even slightly dented. “Don’t get me wrong,” he continues. “I’m very bitter about how I’ve been treated. There are some things I want to bring into the light, but I’m glad I came here. This is the longest time I’ve been straight and sober. But if I wanted to get high tomorrow—my drug of choice—I could do it in this penitentiary. It comes with the territory. But I fight the feeling.”

  I ask if he’s treated like a celebrity by the other inmates. “When I first got here it was pretty hectic,” he sighs, “signing a lot of autographs for people. After they got used to me, it became second nature that I was here. I became just another inmate.” Rick James, king of superfunk, just another inmate. Has it given him humility? “Oh, I was hum–bled when I was at L.A. County, sleeping in a six-by-six cell with rats and roaches. Humbility [sic] became quite easy.” He’s relaxing, calling me by name. “When I lost my mother in 1991 of cancer, Pamela, that was a very traumatic experience for me. When one loses his best friend, that’s a humbling, humiliating experience. You start to question your spirituality, your religion, you question God. Even with my addiction, there was this layer of humbility [sic]. When I was acting out the Rick James persona, one of the things about him, he was not a humble cat! That was a facade, Pamela, you have to understand.”

  The Superfreak behind bars. (ADAM W. WOLF)

  Why did he need a facade? I ask. “I chose to create that persona. I read about the Masai warriors in Africa and put braids in my hair. They used to weave horse and lion hair into their braids. They believed if you wore the hair of powerful animals, you would gain their power and spirit. After I saw Kiss onstage, I wanted my show to look like the Fourth of July. The persona of Rick James was wild and crazy—sex, drugs, and rock and roll … .”

  I remark that I think it’s odd how he refers to himself in the third person. “I relinquished Rick James,” he announces with relish. “I set him free and buried him. He nearly killed me! I’ve always third-person’d him. It was always strange to hear my mother say ‘Rick.’ My name is James Johnson. Rick never sat with me right. It was always uncomfortable.” I ask if he considers himself a violent person and he shakes his head. “If anything I consider myself nonviolent. I’m from the hippie era—peace, love, groovy. You know where I’m coming from. I found the violence coming out of me later, after my mother passed away. Not so much violent, but angry.” Were there things left unsaid? “There were a lot of things left unsaid and undone,” he says sadly, leaning closer to me. “My cocaine addiction was running so rampant, I didn’t know how to stop it. I didn’t understand the sickness.” Perhaps he was too high? “That’s one reason,” he concedes. “And if I was sick, everybody around me was. Everybody did it. You can’t have rock and roll without drugs, you can’t have rock and roll without sex. It’s a vicious circle and I became angry. I was angry when I was young. I was mad about living in a white tenement slum, run off from school by Polish people. I was mad about my mother being in the numbers rackets, working for the Mafia. I was angry about the fact th
at my father would beat my mother on a daily basis, and that my mother would take it in turn and beat on me. I was an abused child. I was mad about all those things, very bitter and very angry.”

  I ask if he’s still in touch with Tania. “Yes. She’s incarcerated, and God knows she’s having her share of problems. There’s a lot of jealousy with those women up there. They’re like really tripped out, you know, that we have a relationship. Tania’s my best friend. We’ve been able to elevate past the bullshit. Plus, we’ve got this son. He’s being taken care of by a nanny. His name is Tasmin, like a Tasmanian devil.” He smiles. “We call him the Tas Man.” I get down to it and ask if he feels justice was served in his case. “As far as my being here? Absolutely not. I’m not saying this because of my ego or profession, but if anybody needs help with drug addiction, it’s me … . Here I am trying to do the best I can to deal with it and they won’t let me.” Rick James also told me as an aside that he had done drugs on occasion with many other people, including O. J. Simpson.

  When did the drug bug bite him? “I started smoking Mary Jane when I was fifteen. And I was snorting an ounce a day when I was recording albums in the seventies and eighties. I sat with a bottle of Blackjack, a bottle of Quaaludes, and an ounce a day.” It sounds a bit excessive to me. Did that seem like the normal thing to do? “It seemed like the way to make a record!” He laughs ruefully. “Everybody did it. Some of them took that extra hit, that extra pill, and died. Jimi, Janis, a few others. A lot of us died inside. When I was smoking five or six thousand dollars of dope a week, I think subconsciously I was looking to die. I was too chickenshit to take a gun to my head or jump off a building.” I empathize. It must have been a horrific way to live. “‘Sucking on the devil’s dick,’ that’s the way I looked at it. I’d look at the fire and the insanity, and the fact that I hadn’t left my room in three or four weeks. I’d look at the deviants around me, how low I had sunk. The room was my gloom.”